The Aug. 12 article headlined “Israeli police oust men, women in joint prayer at Western Wall” (Main news) pinpoints an irony almost too painful to consider.
Israel is supposed to be about religious freedom, not persecution. Jews from all over the world have come to Israel to escape the kind of treatment they received that day from Israeli police–and Orthodox Jews–for the crime of praying at the wall with the opposite sex. It’s almost unbelievable. Shouting, jeering Orthodox Jews telling Jews that they have no right to be there!
Of course, the Nazis said and did precisely the same thing in Germany during the 1930s: They jeered and taunted Jews. And beat them. The next step was Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz.
The philosopher George Santayana wrote a long time ago that those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it. Apparently there are a lot of Jews in Israel today whose memories are tragically, dangerously short.
